Fanfic / Alien/Species Crossover: Return to LV-426

Alien/Species Crossover: Return to LV-426 is a fanfiction by ErikModi set in the Alien universe, and adding elements from the Species franchise. The story relies heavily on Alien: The Roleplaying Game for much of its worldbuilding and setting information.

After the events of Aliens, tensions between the superpowers of human space are on the rise, as each blame the other for mysterious incidents involving total destruction of valuable assets and large loss of life. Then Weyland-Yutani steps up and informs everyone that these incidents are the result of humanity coming into contact with a fantastically hostile and dangerous alien species. A facility is established on one of the worlds touched by this destruction, LV-426, where the Company invites everyone, even competing corporations, to come and watch as they attempt to secure a specimen of what's known as Xenomorph XX121. Not to profit from it, but to investigate ways to most effectively kill them.

The United States Colonial Marine Corps has an expansive base at this facility, and is undertaking their own research project. With the Artificial Womb Soldier Program having been shuttered, the USCMC is investigating the possibility of reviving it using a DNA strain sent to Earth in a radio transmission over a hundred years ago. Sergeant Davis AW Pike is reassigned to train and evaluate Subject I5E for suitability for a new Artificial Womb Soldier Program. But neither Pike nor Lise are prepared for how meeting each other will affect them, or how the I5E Project will interact with Weyland-Yutani's attempts to capture and study Xenomorph XX121.

Two sequel/side-stories are written; the first adding the Predator into the mix, the second a short standalone entry.

In addition to standard tropes from both Alien and Species, this story contains examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Badass: The story follows the RPG's lead in making the Xenomorphs extremely deadly threats, not only incredibly lethal but incredibly difficult to kill. When Pike and Lise go to chase down the four surviving escapees, it's believed the odds are ridiculously in favor of the Xenomorphs, when in most other Aliens media two people with fully loaded pulse rifles against four Aliens would be no problem. It takes twenty rounds to put down the first Runner, and most of their ammo to take down the third, as it uses darkness and mobility to evade most of their shots. Lise manages to kill one Runner hand to hand and injure the Drone, which Pike finishes off.
• Adaptational Heroism: Weyland-Yutani is not Stupid Evil in this fic. While their goal is still to capture, contain, and study a Xenomorph specimen, it is to discover how to most effectively kill them, not exploit them for profit. Boone, Lise, and Pike actually seek sanctuary at the WY complex from General Phelps looking to summarily execute them.
  Doctor Donnasdottir: This is about protecting humanity, not profits. Greed has cost us too much to continue it as a policy regarding XX121. Data from this project will be shared as necessary to the benefit of everyone.
• Amoral Attorney: Carson Blake represents Weyland-Yutani's legal arm at this secret project, and among other things is responsible for using legal maneuvering to secure a human test subject from which to hatch their first Xenomorph. Subverted when Blake actually turns out to be relatively decent, fairly compensating the man's family for his participation in an almost certainly lethal experiment, and making sure he's giving completely informed consent. Blake is also responsible for shielding Boone, Lise, and Pike from General Phelps' overreach of authority.
• Artificial Human: The two main characters are two different versions of this.
  • Pike is an AW, genetically modified and raised from birth to be someone's idea of the perfect Marine. He's stronger and more fit than the average human, but has had almost any sense of creativity, individuality, personality, or humanity drummed out of him by his literal lifetime of military education.
  • Lise is a hybrid grown from a combination of human DNA and the DNA of a mysterious alien species who contacted Earth over radio communication in the 1990s. She's been raised in a more supportive and enriching environment, but still has alien instincts that sometimes rear their head.
• Asshole Victim: In the third story, the crew of the SS Craster. They land on Alfheim, looking to exploit whatever is valuable enough for there to be a classified and highly quarantined UAAC military colony on the planet. It quickly becomes clear all four men are also rapists, and two of them grab and attempt to assault Sophie Bayonet as she bathes nude in a pond. Sophie makes like Sil and slaughters all four men in horrific fashion, but they definitely had it coming.
• Baffled by Own Biology:
  • Like in the source material, hybrid Lise has no idea what's happening to her when she enters her cocoon. Boone tries to comfort her, but Lise is terrified and in pain as her body moves forward with its life cycle. Later, Lise's daughter Ilse has a much easier time, as Lise is able to guide her and explain that it's a natural part of their biology and nothing to be afraid of.
  • Most of Pike's issues are related to What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?, but several of the biological underpinnings of attraction and fatherhood catch him completely off-guard, as an AW raised entirely with military discipline and no sense of self or awareness of his own psychological or biological urges.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: Lise has some senses humans lack. When she was going into her cocoon, she knew she needed lots of calories, and which foods would best provide that. When she sees Pike, she can sense that he's an utterly perfect mate for her, and shows zero interest in any other male, perhaps due to Pike being an AW genetically designed to be physically superior to ordinary humans. Ilse has no such feeling towards Pike, thinking it's her alien sense telling her that, as her father, Pike is too closely related to her to provide necessary genetic diversity. Later in the story, Lise can tell when there is and is not "room" for her species to expand, and her sex drive modulates accordingly: shutting down completely when they're on a ship that can barely support the numbers they already have, kicking back in when they colonize an empty planet with room for millions, if not billions, of her decendants.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The story takes only the first Species film as canon, and engages with the questions that film raised: what was the intent and purpose of sending the alien genome to Earth, along with "helpful" instructions for combining it with human DNA? Was this an attempt to wipe out humanity, or something else? When they reach the Sender homeworld, the ultimate answer is "yes." The Senders wanted to help protect humanity from the Engineers and their bioweapons, so sent a DNA strain that would give them the kinds of advantages necessary to withstand the Black Goo and Xenomorphs. The Senders intended for the hybrids to spread and replace humanity, when Boone points out that's still rendering humanity extinct, the Sender representative counters that it's evolution, and evolution is like death: inevitable, and not worth getting worked up over. The Senders consider the Engineers wiping out life forms they create as repugnant, but the Senders making a new life form to supplant and replace an existing one as friendly assistance.
• Canon Discontinuity: The story decides to only take Alien and Aliens as canon, though includes Prometheus and Covenant in broad strokes. Additionally, only the first Species film is considered canon for purposes of the crossover.
• Hands-On Approach: When Pike teaches Lise to fire a Pulse Rifle. Though in an inversion of how the trope normally goes, Pike intends nothing by it, he's just legitimately showing her proper firing stance and technique. She's the one who gets all charged up with him being so close to her, his hands on her body and his scent in her nostrils.
• Head-Turning Beauty:
  • Lise is exceptionally beautiful, other characters often note she's "sex on legs" or "a walking wet dream" or similar phrases. All the hybrids are ridiculously attractive, which makes Boone question the motives of whoever sent their genetic information.
  • Doctor Tanya Donnasdottir is nicknamed "DD," not because of her last name and never to her face. She's the only human in the story described as close to as gorgeous as Lise is.
• Homage:
  • Pike and other AWs are based heavily on the film Soldier, being stoic, disciplined, not speaking unless spoken to and keeping their replies terse, having zero understanding of anything outside military life, and having only one response to anything that upsets them: violence. When preparing to fight the Xenomorphs, Pike almost quotes Todd, stating "We're going to kill them all, sir."
  • When reaching the Senders' homeworld, the only thing they find is an organism left behind by the Senders to communicate with anyone who dropped by and protect the Senders' secrets. This creature is acknowledged to basically be the same as that from The Thing (1982).
• Mythology Gag:
  • Several to Aliens (Steve Perry Trilogy).
    • The human host for the Xenomorph the Company breeds is Likowski, James T., just as in those novels, though his circumstances are entirely different.
    • Rim is mentioned as another incident involving XX121, with only Corporal Wilks and a civilian girl named Billie as survivors. Billie is institutionalized for her Xenomorph-related trauma, as she was at the start of the trilogy.
    • General Thomas AW Spears appears in the second half of the story as an antagonist. Third Base and Major Powell are important, and Spears' arc in this story is basically his arc in "Nightmare Asylum," except breeding hybrids and raising them like AWs instead of breeding Xenomorphs as his "ultimately loyal soldiers."
    • The telepathic communication of the Xenomorphs is an important plot point. Lise is telepathic, too, and she and the Xenomorphs can sense each other.
  • The story also uses several concepts from the development phase of the first Species film.
    • Denis Feldman's original conception was that it was unsophisticated for aliens to visit Earth in "a giant tin can," so envisioned contact with aliens taking place via information exchange, perhaps the aliens teaching humans to build something that could talk to them more efficiently than radio waves. He imagined a biological being instead of a mechanical device, this leading to the idea of growing an alien hybrid. The hybrids having telepathic communication, and reaching a "critical mass" where there are enough of them psychically communicate with the Senders, is an important plot point.
    • H. R. Giger's initial conception for Sil was that she was to be translucent, and glow with heat as she grew angrier or more threatened. Lise and the other hybrids have this ability, able to emit intense heat in their hybrid forms, giving them yet another weapon to use when they have to defend themselves. Fire is never brought up as a way to potentially kill them, as Giger felt fire would be ineffective against beings that can emit their own burning heat.
• Parental Substitute: It's noted several times that Colonel Doctor Patricia Boone, head of the I5E Project, is the closest thing Lise has to a mother, and she's the closest thing Boone has to a daughter. Boone takes Lise's health and well-being very seriously.
• Playing with Fire: The story uses an unused concept from Species, that Sil would glow with red heat in her hybrid form, growing brighter and hotter the more threatened she felt. Lise possesses this ability, and uses it to good effect against the Xenomorphs.
• Posthuman Nudism: Downplayed. Lise wears clothes most of the time, but is very casual about being seen naked. Part of this is because, as much as Boone has tried to raise her in a supportive and enriching environment, Lise is still a military biological experiment and Boone is the doctor running that experiment, so Boone "has seen Lise in about every way she could be seen." Because her hybrid form can emit intense heat, she sometimes burns off her clothes if she transforms while dressed. In the third story, the hybrids working to dismantle the ship that illegally landed on Alfheim work naked, because cleaning their skin is easier than cleaning clothes, and supplies are thin enough they'd rather damage their bodies which can heal almost instantly and fight off infections than damage clothing, which is much more difficult to repair or replace.
• Precursors: The Engineers are mentioned, and remain highly mysterious. There's also whoever sent the message to Earth containing the genetic information that created Lise, called the Senders, for lack of a better word.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Boone has run some tests on Lise, and discovered that part of her brain is responsible for triggering her body to regenerate, and believes that destroying this part of the brain would be the only way to kill her or others like her. This isn't tested in the main story, though Lise's dreams about Xenomorphs include the sense their inner mouths are primed to strike at that vulnerable spot, indicating they know what the hybrids are, how they work, and how to effectively kill them. It is confirmed in the first sequel/side story, where a Xenomorph unleashed on Alfheim by the Predator uses its inner mouth to kill one of the hybrids.
• Shout-Out: The ending of the first story, where the hybrids are given a world deemed too dangerous to colonize and left to their own devices, is noted to be inspired by both "Space Seed" and The Cobra Trilogy. Speaking of Cobra, the hybrids' ability to sense when an environment can support more of them is inspired by the Aventinian spine leopard.
• The Stoic: Pike, owing to his life as an AW. Even after attempts are made to make him a more well-rounded human being, he remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, for people to read unless they know him well.
• Telepathic Spacemen: "Esper tests" are mentioned as a routine thing, humans have a wide range of "esper scores" that determine how psychically attuned they are. The Xenomorphs are also telepathic, and this can "bleed over" to psychically attuned humans. Ripley is noted to have a "high average" esper rating and still be dealing with Alien-related trauma; Billie is has a very high esper score and is extremely screwed up from her encounter with them. Lise and hybrids like her are telepathic. When the chestburster pops out of Likowski, Lise senses it immediately, and the Xenomorph senses her in return. When Lise starts having kids, and those kids start having kids, they are all able to communicate with each other, and sometimes with ordinary humans, even those with very low esper ratings. Reaching a "critical mass" where there are enough hybrids to form a strong enough psychic signal to receive another message from the Senders kicks off the second half of the story.
• Uncanny Valley: Because of his behavior, Pike falls into this. The other Marines are uncomfortable around him because he's too still, too stoic, too disciplined. He doesn't relax, he seems incapable of relaxing, always at some form of attention. He doesn't chatter or joke around, he only speaks when spoken to and only replies with short, direct responses. Lise is a downplayed version; it's noted several times that there's something too perfect, too flawless about her beauty, that she's inhumanly beautiful, but it doesn't put anyone off.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?: Lise is almost instantly attracted to Pike, and Pike pretty quickly grows attracted to her. But as an AW, Pike has never been exposed to emotions or drives beyond "be a good soldier," and has no idea how to cope with the feelings Lise is awakening in him.

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